Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The Warsaw Ghetto Monument

I took this photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem during a visit to the Holy Land some years ago. It is a place where the victims of the WW2 Holocaust are remembered.

Yad Vashem has a good photographic and documentary record of a large number of the victims in addition to the exhibitions. Records of the victims, including some individual and family photographs of the victims are accessible online.

Yes, we did visit the garden honouring the 'Righteous Gentiles' that you mention. It is right that we should remember what happened to the victims of the Holocaust, why it happened and who the victims were. But we should also remember those people who helped others from becoming victims, and Yad Vashem does just that. There must be others whose names will never be known.

One of the people I interviewed for my university research in France was M. Jean-Paul Nogaret. During WW2 the Nogarets took in a Jewish family from Paris, but originally from Poland. This Jewish family were rounded up and sent to the Concentration camps. Only the father survived. I have copies of photographs of this family, Jean-Paul's testimony to Yad Vashem and a copy of Jean-Pierre's own book in which he explains further about what happened.

One of the stories I posted to the "People's War" site was about the Rachnudel family:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/21/a3560221.shtml

These are the names of the Rachnudel family of Badaroux who died in the Holocaust:

If you go to the Yad Vashem website, it is possible to find further details about them by searching the database of victims. The information was given by M. Nogaret so that they would be remembered. I learnt about this family from people who knew them and were their friends and neighbours. It is dreadful to think what happened. But we can at least remember each and every individual. Yad Vashem is one place that does this really well.